How the building of Scottish Parliament became a Grand Designs nightmare

The story of the Scottish Parliament building can be mapped onto an episode of Grand Designs. It started in 1998 with a budget of £50 million. Two years later that had more than doubled, and the parliament was squatting in a souped-up version of the infamous Grand Designs caravan in the garden – in this instance, the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly building. By 2000 the budget had climbed to £195 million, and by the end of that year both client and architect were dead. But still the project continued, and more expensively still. Within a year it was costing £260 million.

This is usually the point in Grand Designs where they have maxed out their credit cards and borrowed money from family and friends, while all dreams of being in the house for Christmas before the new baby arrives have been long forgotten. By 2003, costs had reached £375 million.

By 2004 it had risen again to a frightening £431 million. In 2007, the final cost was calculated as £414.4 million, over eight times the original budget. In Grand Designs terms, the couple have divorced, the baby is now at university, and the caravan has been in the garden so long it is now listed.

It had all started off with another fairly straightforward design competition, focusing on three sites around Edinburgh. Scottish First Minister Donald Dewar – back in the days when Labour dominated Scottish politics – and Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark were among the small jury. The shortlist For Tomorrow 296 contained many safe pairs of hands, and perhaps that’s why a dazzling sleight of hand would stand out.

There was modernist star Richard Meier; New Yorkers Kohn Pedersen Fox, who’d made their mark in the UK with two of the original Canary Wharf blocks; Michael Wilford & Partners, who’d won the design for the British embassy in Berlin; old-school modernists Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, of National Gallery carbuncle fiasco; and trusted rising stars Allies and Morrison, who’d designed the British embassy in Dublin.

Critic Deyan Sudjic concentrated on the more sober entries, but allowed himself a moment to imagine that even the most out-there candidate had a chance. ‘What, for example, will the non-specialist see in Enric Miralles’s presentation, which is spattered with fragments of poetry and Hockney-style photographic collages?’ he enquired.

‘There is a building lurking underneath all this, perhaps the most radical of all the proposals. But teasing it out from the undergrowth demands more patience than can be expected of those unfamiliar with simple plans.’

There had been 70 entries, and its project manager Bill Armstrong had placed Miralles 44th on the list. So when Miralles and his wife and partner Benedetta Tagliabue were announced as winners, there was astonishment.

How had this most conservative of all competitions been won by what seemed a fundamentally bonkers piece of magical thinking?

For one, most architects had complied with the brief and the suggested sites, but Miralles had gone rogue and suggested a new location, opposite the Queen’s house at Holyrood, at the foot of the Royal Mile. This had once been the garden of Queensberry House, home to James Douglas, the 2nd Duke of Queensberry, who had been responsible for rolling the independent Scottish state into what would become the United Kingdom back in 1707.

‘Donald Dewar was quite taken by the idea of bringing back the Scottish parliament and building it in his garden,’ John Ramsay, then an architect in local firm RMJM, told me. ‘As a gesture it had a certain kind of appeal about it.’

‘The thing they really liked were Enric’s ideas about the Scottish tradition of gatherings,’ explained Ramsay, ‘but also the Scottish tradition of the Highland Games. He was also greatly taken by the landscape of Scotland.’

This interest led to a fascination with the history of the city, its historic fabric and the great buildings tightly packed together, and how the new parliament building might relate to that.

There had been an initial backlash against Miralles and Tagliabue in the media because they weren’t Scottish. Scottish architects reading these pieces must have found this bitterly amusing, because the country has a terrible recent record of employing and promoting its own. While many of Britain’s best contemporary architectural practices have been Scots, they have often had to find work elsewhere.

The Scottish Parliament was allowed to be a more romantic gesture than the value-engineered tat that a culture of PFI and its replacement, Scottish Futures Trust, would usually encourage.

Enric Miralles had been described as naughty, hugely creative, likeable and frustrating. So when he was paired with more corporate local architects RMJM, who would be looking after the day-to-day issues on site, fireworks were sure to follow.

‘It was decided that Enric didn’t really have the manpower to deliver the project,’ John Ramsay explained to me. The brief continued to evolve, as did Miralles’s design, and the partnership with RMJM had its, erm, awkward moments.

‘I was appointed architect,’ Miralles said to the Scottish architects. ‘I will do everything on this job. You will take no decisions whatsoever.’

Ramsay explained the relationship: ‘In a very crude way it was designed in Barcelona and delivered in Edinburgh.’ Ramsay had joined initially as RMJM’s project architect for the MSP offices, but within months had taken on looking after the cladding of the building, liaison with the security services (to become a major issue after the events of 9/11), and the relationship with what he termed ‘hairy arsed builders’.

But working with a practice based 1,300 miles away came with challenges, not least of which was having to grapple with new technology. ‘This was the early days of sending stuff over the internet,’ recalled Ramsay. ‘We’d get a phone call on the Wednesday and Enric’s team would say, right, we’re going to send you this next batch of drawings. And it would take overnight until lunchtime the next day to get all the drawings through and for our IT people to process them and check if they were actually openable files.’

Dave Rogers of Construction News came to the defence of the building companies who were shouldering much of the blame for overspending. ‘My view is that it isn’t the contractors’ fault,’ he said. ‘The problem is that too many people have a “say-so”, and a lot of them are politicians. The poor old contractors have to work round every little modification.’

Alan Mack from Bovis Lend Lease, who were attempting to project manage this vast ever-changing carnival, was even more blunt. ‘We’re just very useful to be used,’ he said. ‘It’s just a series of pissing contests going on between these various groups . . . and the project is irrelevant.’

The one thing no one could get away from was that erecting a parliament building was going to be political. ‘It was a political project, so everything that happened ended up in the newspapers,’ John Ramsay told me. ‘And certain newspapers inspired by certain political parties tried to make the most of anything that wasn’t clear.’

A review chaired by architect John Spencely reported that Miralles had become scapegoated: from the outside it looked like the architect’s fault, but from the inside it seemed the reverse – as in the Welsh Assembly, there had been a breakdown in project management.

Spencely had also observed a fashionable failing of the New Labour era: ‘They’re all spinning. It gets out of control.’

Not halfway into the project, more serious issues came to bear. In April 2000, Miralles was diagnosed with a brain tumour and had to fly to the US for treatment. In July, he died. ‘Enric died within a month or so of him telling us he had completed the design,’ recalled John Ramsay. ‘It wasn’t going to change again, he was happy with the way it was.'

Within three months, the First Minister and Miralles’s champion Donald Dewar was dead too, after falling from the steps of Bute House.

Miraculously, all 11 buildings that make up the Parliament were completed, and it opened in October 2004. For such a spectacular building, the first time I visited I almost missed it. Remarkable though it is, from the bottom of Canongate it feels perfectly normal in a city – a street – of extraordinary architectural gestures.

When I did clock them, the buildings seemed like some sort of mirage, shimmering like a series of ghost ships washed up here on a long since vanished tide. The structures overlap, fuse together, caught out of phase with our humdrum reality and each other. Screens like bundles of hurdles bar the windows, one of many details that give a primitive and domestic sense in all of this grandeur, the remembered bustle of medieval streets.

The auditorium makes the most of the city’s precious moments of sunlight, with skylights and windows connecting it to the incredible landscape all around. ‘In visual contact with nature and geology’ is how the architect put it.

Inside the main chamber, the sloped floor and raked seating are arranged in a v-shape to allow for what was hoped to be a gentler, more consensual politics – everyone working together rather than in constant Westminster-style combative opposition. Miralles repeatedly referred to it as ‘a gathering place’.

‘After all,’ he’d said, ‘Parliament is just a way of sitting together’.

Edited extract from Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain by John Grindrod, published by Faber & Faber, £30